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Welcome to Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife Drinks 101, where in just a few minutes each week I help make low, no, and light alcohol drinks make sense. Today we're looking at why alcohol-free drinks are so expensive. This is a question that comes up again and again and again. And I do understand if it's one you've been asking, particularly if you're new to exploring low, no, and light alcohol drinks. So, at a very top-level

What Alcohol Does in Your Drink

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view, alcohol does so much more in a drink than just get you drunk. And each of those functions that it does needs to be replaced or replicated in some way when it comes to low-no drinks. And that is where the costs come in. So alcohol adds texture, body, and mouthfeel to a drink. A common complaint about the first generation of alcohol-free drinks, so I think sort of 15 years ago, was that they were thin, light, and watery. Without the weight of alcohol, non-alk drinks can feel like they are lacking in body, which nobody wants, of course. Alcohol is also a preservative, so it allows drinks to remain safe to drink for years, even decades. Think about that bottle of oozo in the back of the cupboard from your trip to Greece, or wines that have been left in cellars to age for decades. Standard alcoholic drink producers, therefore, can benefit from bulk production discounts in ways that smaller independent brands cannot, because they can't risk making too many drinks that are going to spoil if they don't sell in time. Alcohol also binds and matures flavors. So while alcohol is preserving your drink, it's also allowing the ingredients and the flavors inside the bottle to merge and to develop. That is why wine is aged for so long. It creates a depth of flavor that can feel missing without that time to mature. And then we have things like production considerations. So many alcohol-free drinks are de-alcoholized, something that we will look at in another episode in more detail. But in short, that means that the base beverage used to at one point contain alcohol, so it's made to standard production methods, and then all that alcohol is removed from the drink. So that's already two processes. Then what has been removed alongside the alcohol is usually things like taste, texture, and longevity that we've spoken about has to be reintroduced with other ingredients and other processes. So that's a third process, plus the cost of the added ingredients and equipment as well. And then even drinks that aren't de-alcoholized and are produced specifically to be low in alcohol in the first place require things like specialized yeasts, specialist equipment, and new techniques that have to be developed. And lastly, for today, alcohol-free drinks as we know them today are in fact pretty new. So whilst breweries have been making AF beer for as long as they've made full strength ones, which is one of the reasons why AFB is so similar to full strength and such a success in this category, things like spirits and wines and ready-to-drink cocktails are all breaking new ground on what feels like a weekly basis. I'm always hearing about new developments. That ramps up the cost. So we're thinking about research and development to make them good enough for you to enjoy. All of these added costs, including other things I haven't mentioned today, make for a very expensive and resource and time-consuming category of drinks.

Why Prices May Stay Higher

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The good news is that as the category grows and develops, these costs will eventually begin to come down. But it's unlikely that non-alcoholic drinks will ever be considerably cheaper than alcohol full ones. And really, I have to ask, would you want them to be? Alcohol is actually the cheapest ingredient in your glass. It's a byproduct of fermentation and not where the real skill lies. What we need is research, development, continued improvement, better ingredients, great sourcing, all of those things that we're all calling for. And that will always come at a cost. As we know from many other parts of life, cheaper isn't always better. In episode 108 costs, what you're really paying for, I explore each of these in more detail. And then in the following episode 109, I go on to look at the more personal cost impacts of drinking. I'll link them both in the show notes for you, where you'll also find my email address if you'd like to send me a question to answer on another drinks 101, or there's a feature where you can just send me a text message. Next time, are 0.5% drinks really alcohol free? Until then, cheers to a life less intoxicated.